


Unseen

by Antares10



Series: Seto Kaiba and his horrible life choices [3]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Delusions, Hurt No Comfort, Kaiba hates being human, Kaiba not dealing well with the whole situation, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentioned Car Accident, Mokuba being in America and not dealing with this, Obsession, Pre-Dark Side of Dimensions, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, attempt bribing of the justice system, could be read as platonic, driving while sleep deprived, explicit description of a public bathroom, explicit description of bathroom cleaning, hinted prideshipping, implied unhealth brother relationship, mental downwards spiral, prompt: Urine as torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24325948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antares10/pseuds/Antares10
Summary: Yami is gone for a while. Mokuba is gone too. Kaiba continues to not cope well... (or at all).Or: Seto Kaiba has to clean a public bathroom and spirals downwards HARD.
Relationships: Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi
Series: Seto Kaiba and his horrible life choices [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/704361
Kudos: 7
Collections: Banned Banned Together Bingo 2020, Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Unseen

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Banned Together Bingo 2020, Prompt: Urine as Torture.

All in all, Mokuba enjoyed the USA. He hadn't expected it, really. But the western lifestyle spoke to him. He liked the food and the customs and the fact that his current home was a whole ocean and more away from his brother.

He felt guilty about that. Sometimes. He wondered how his brother was doing, if he was eating and sleeping and doing something else than to obsess about perfection and power and cards and somebody who was already dead for hundreds of years.

But then he remembered what his life before his move was like. It actually included a lot of cleaning. Cleaning up some mess of a breakfast, cleaning up a office that was destroyed in a fit of rage, cleaning up blood and sweat and pushing his brother to the bed or to a shower...

Yeah no.

His life was different now. He studied and learned how to take care of a business. He worked part-time and was involved with the American branch of Kaiba Corp. He had friends now and an active social life he actually enjoyed. People his age who didn't know him as Kaiba's little brother or (in some very unflattering cases) as “kidnapping bait”.

There was no crazy card game tournaments who decided the faith of the world anymore. Nobody he needed to impress with strength or something like that. The Duel monster craze had reached America alright but it wasn't as bad as in Japan.

Mokuba still visited a therapist, a new one now. He worked hard to work through everything that had happened to him. He was happy now.

He still worried about his brother from time to time.

So when he opened the news app on his home and saw the name “Seto Kaiba” in big letters in one of the title stories, he just had to read it.

**Multimillionaire Seto Kaiba sentenced to Community service after car accident ruled to be his fault.**

Mokuba sighed deeply.

At least he was still alive... maybe this was the wake-up call his brother needed.

He hoped so.

* * *

Seto Kaiba was not happy. It be absolutely fair, he was that kind of person who would never say they were happy. He might have phrased it as “being satisfied” or “content with the current situation” but not happy.

And he was even less so now than ever.

The whole thing was a farce. Yes, there was a car accident but really, what idiot was on the street at 3 am in the morning? They had to be up to something! Seto himself didn't count, he was actually important and there was an important reason why he was driving his own car around at that time.

He only wished he remembered the exact reason.

But really, the whole thing was blown out of proportion. That car of that guy he hit was maybe worth one wheel of his own car. And he wasn't even hurt that badly, he just had a light concussion without lasting damage. Seto really didn't understand what the big deal was. Maybe the guy wanted to get some money out of him?

Well money he had. Seto was really ready to just open the wallet and throw some money around if this whole thing was just over quickly. He had wasted to much time already on the whole thing. But nooooo, the stupid judge had to declare that he couldn't just pay a fee and go. It was community service or jail.

Jail without a laptop or any means of getting stuff done. So community service it was.

It was so stupid! He even offered that guy some money to just drop the whole thing but he refused. The judge had said something about learning responsibility or something. Pah! He was responsible for his corporation! What did all these people know of responsibility?

Nothing. Nothing at all it was but now Seto was forced to waste time. Two-hundred hours of community service! The nerve!

At first he thought he could at least do something useful with that time... like, his research to bring back the image of the strongest duelist he ever encountered to study him WAS a service to the community right? Or at least testing his new holo technology to make Dueling even more exciting and better?

Apparently no, at least according to the judge. What a stupid person. No wonder the world was going down more and more.

No, the judge had the nerve to define what Seto had to do in these two-hundred hours: Cleaning up the public bathrooms of the courthouse.

It was disgusting. Humiliating! It was just... icky.

First thing first: He was not allowed to wear his usual clothes! Well, Seto supposed it would make sense, he didn't want the stench of human waste on his nice clothes, but standing there in just... jeans and a shirt felt wrong.

There was a lady that gave him his rubber gloves and his cleaning supplies and showed him where he could get more and how to store everything in the little closet right next to the toilets. She would do the woman's bathroom, he the men's.

She didn't took his money to just do the job for him. She just looked at him blankly for a few seconds and continued as if he hadn't said anything. It was so frustrating! After an hour Seto was left alone to lean up his first bathroom.

It was disgusting! Seto never really set foot into public spaces like this so he had no point of reference, but he was sure this must be some really low class bathroom!

The whole room was decked out with white tiles, on the ground and on the walls. The harsh white light coming from the ceiling lamps made the filth on the ground stand out even more. The trash cans under the row of white sinks were full with used paper towels. The mirrors hanging over the sinks looked dirty. The bathroom stalls were all open, the toilets inside simple white, some of them more dirty than others, some had toilet paper laying all over them. And then there were the row of urinals. There were five in total. They were white probably but they looked yellow and grey now and the smell was overwhelmingly bad.

Seto was supposed to clean all of this in two hours. So far he hadn't managed to step fully into this room.

It was disgusting and revolting. And a reminder just how dirty and icky and plain stupid human bodies were.

He put on his rubber gloves and decided to start with the trash-cans. After he emptied them (finding lots of things that were NOT just paper towels in there) he turned to the mirrors. His own reflection looked back at him.

Plain clothes. Rubber gloves. Dark circles under his eyes. He didn't slept much these days. He had way to much to do, way to important things to archive for something mundane and wasteful like sleep.

He had dabbled a bit in methods to reduce the amount of sleep he needed. Some substances were promising but so far the drawback was not worth the few more hours of work time.

Mokoba left. It's been weeks. Maybe months... He sometimes wrote him to remember sleep.

Seto hated it. Hated everything, hated how he looked in the mirror. Weak. Normal. Average.

_Like somebody HE wouldn't look at ever. Like somebody HE would just ignore. A background-character, an unimportant NPC in the backdrop of the bigger game._

_He left after all without saying goodbye. Without looking at him. Without one last duel to SHOW him..._

He hated it. Angrily Seto slandered the mirror with the cleaning solution and started scrubbing, trying to ignore the way his reflection distorted.

He turned to the toilets next. Cleaning was slow but steady and it was torture. The smell of the human waste and the cleaning solutions combined nearly overwhelmed him. The sight was disgusting. Urine stains and Urine on the ground made his boots stick a bit and Kaiba couldn't not imagine the disgusting fluid staining his shoes forever, making him smell this smell forever.

He flushed another toilet, shivering as he looked to the other two he had to do.

He used maybe a bit to much of some of the cleaning stuff. He supposed it didn't matter. This place was so dirty, he was justified in using more!

The other Yugi probably never had to deal with this... he didn't had a body, right? Not of his own. He had just used Yugi's whenever he needed to.

Sometimes Kaiba envied him for that. He had all this time, didn't need to sleep, didn't need to talk and interact with stupid people, didn't need to eat or drink or do any of the boring, stupid, mind-numbing or time wasting things a human body required for upkeep.

He could dedicate all his time to becoming a better duelist, to think of new strategies and to study and to practice and grow more and more powerful while everybody else would fall behind. And Yugi had dealt with all the stuff the body needed to stay alive.

Maybe that was why he was so good. Why he was better than Kaiba, why he WON. He always said Yugi was his partner, right? Maybe that was why...

_But in the end, he choose to duel YUGI, who was just the upkeep for the body. Not you, not the one who made him LOOK, who made him FIGHT. He choose the body and he lost. Body over mind._

“ _You need help, Kaiba. A lot of it. And I am afraid I am not the one who can provide it.”_

_Bullshit, Bullshit, BULLSHIT and he LEFT before he could PROVE him that he DIDN'T NEED ANY HELP!_

There were only the urinals left. They were filthy. So filthy and still wet and everything in Seto REVOLTED to go closer but he HAD to. The stench was giving him a headache but maybe it was just the cleaning solutions.

Maybe it was both.

He looked at the first one. There was urine all over it. Yellow puddles half dried on the ground around it too. His body was weak too, wanting to revolt against him.

His body was the worst. Human bodies were the worst.

He drenched the urinal and the ground with cleaning solution. The smell got stronger but he didn't care.

It was all the other Yugi's fault! All of it!

If he hadn't just left, none of this would have happened!

He would still be at the top, he could still have those unimaginable highs of the duel, he could still sleep and eat and Mokuba would still be here to help and he wouldn't have driven his car at 3 am and wouldn't be here now to clean up HUMAN PISS!

He wanted that bastard here so he could punch him, so he could scream at him and shake him and ask him WHY HE DIDN'T FIX IT when he was fixing EVERYTHING ELSE! He wanted to challenge him to a duel again, he wanted him to LOOK AT HIM again.

When he started cleaning the second and third urinal he could almost imagine how he would laugh at him. His mocking little laugh he did when he knew you were right there in his trap, when Seto made that ONE MOVE he wanted him to do so he could turn the whole thing around. That he had anticipated because he knew Seto well, knew almost every little nook and cranny of his way of thinking, of his soul and the thrill to go against such a force, a force that knew Seto almost better than he himself did made it all worth, the smugness and the little laugh and the consequences of coming this close to the light that was this incredible, monstrous mind.

He could almost imagine him standing behind him, pushing him down to lean out the human waste. Punishment.

_You lost the game, Kaiba._

He only noticed when he fished cleaning the last urinal that he was crying. Salty water drained away just the same as everything else.

He wouldn't give up. He wouldn't break. He would find him again and make him look at him again.

_Game on._

**Author's Note:**

> My prompt was "Urine as Torture" as stated above... my take was (and I hope that it came across well XD) that a character considered dealing with urine as distressing and well... torturous. Kaiba with his mountain of issues that borders on hate for his own body in my series, deals not well with well... any proof that human bodies do a lot of things, need a lot of things (and that he has one of his own XD). So Kaiba suffers through his community service and the thankless task of cleaning up the public bathroom while not being happy about it one bit.


End file.
